ArtistInfo

The Rolling Stones
Houston Can Sing

Album 2015 on Sweet Black Angels label
Rock

Soundboard concert at Astrodome, Houston TX, USA, 28th October 1981 Limited & Numbered edition of only 50 items worldwide Original liner notes: Short story for those who don't like reading: this release uses an UNRELEASED SOUNDBOARD TAPE, an upgrade over previous releases. And now, let's get started! The Rolling Stones American Tour 1981 is well documented nowadays through various soundboard releases, but in the eighties there weren't so many and almost 99% of them not taken from the radio broadcasts were from Hampton's pay-per-view. Several shows were partially filmed for the press (TV stations are usually allowed to film 2 / 3 songs at the start of a concert): Buffalo 27th Sept, Rockford 1st Oct, Dallas 1st Nov, Hartford 10th Nov, Cedar Falls 20th Nov, and Syracuse 27th Nov; Los Angeles shows 9th and 11th Oct were rumoured to be on the unreleased The American Tour Of The Rolling Stones by Don Girdan; some shows were professionally filmed by Hal Ashby for their possible inclusion on the upcoming Let's Spend The Night Together film: Seattle 14th & 15th Oct, Houston 28th Oct. East Rutherford 5th & 6th & 7th Nov, and Tempe 13th Dec; the Pontiac 30th Nov show appeared in NBC's Inside & Out; finally the second to last show in Hampton 18th Dec was broadcast in the pay-per-view special. No doubt the Hampton show was released A LOT through the 80's and 90's (sound was superb), but some other filmed shows slowly started to move hands in VHS and in 1995 the Japanese label Vinyl Gang Productions published the 28th October Houston show in the double CD Houston Can You sing? (VGP 053). The soundtrack of the VHS is a Mono Soundboard recording and so VGP's release did sound good, but the bad points are: the tape they used did have A LOT of background noise (hiss), the music do not run at the right speed (runs a little slow; might be from a PAL to NTSC transfer or an incorrect / not perfect speed adjustment), and there were some occasional cuts (to eliminate the boring crowd noise between songs, we presume). Apart from those problems the VHS soundtrack (and all -three / four- transfers to DVDR of the VHS tapes, and of course the VGP release) did have the Mono Soundboard "enhanced" with some audience noise from the concert, specially during Mick Jagger's chats between songs and occasionally even through the songs. Let's go back to the tour and remember a good part of it was being filmed, The Rolling Stones travelled with a cameramen team and one of them used to hook-up a cassette recorder to the soundboard / monitors / P.A. rig while filming the shows and in a very intelligent movement he did use the LEFT channel of the stereo for recording the SOUNDBOARD and the RIGHT channel for recording his own camera sound, this resulting in a PERFECT SOUNDBOARD in the LEFT channel and GOOD AUDIENCE (with crowd noise) in the RIGHT channel. These cameraman tapes were the source of all the raw Mono Soundboards that Dog & Cats (the following incarnation of Vinyl Gang Productions) used through the 2000's -at least until Wolfgang's Vault did stream in MP3 quality a few shows in Stereo Soundboard-. You can check that there's usually a tape change before every 45 minutes (that was each side's tape length). The Houston 28th show wasn't published again until 2013, when Empress Valley Supreme Disc did release the double CD Live In Houston (EVSD 609-610) claiming to be sourced from the following night's show (the 29th) at the same venue. The credit information was wrong: from introduction's Take The A Train to Tumbling Dice the source is 28th, and from All Down The Line to the outro (Jimi Hendrix's The Star-Spangled Banner) is 29th. The good thing is they used a Mono Soundboard (without the "enhanced" Audience of the VHS Soundtrack), but the bad points are: although the stereo channels on the CDs are different there is no real stereo (EVSD created some kind of artificial stereo effect with no real channel separation: all instruments and vocals come from the same direction), there are the usual Empress Valley cuts here and there (so that the little gaps in their source were not noticed... what you will notice are some weird lost beats from time to time!), a heavy de-noise of the background noise and over-EQ, making it sound unreal and over-processed, losing the real virtue of a live album: the feeling of being there. So, what's the source of this release? The source is a STRAIGHT TRANSFER of the cameraman tapes, only one tape was available and that means it goes from the Introduction to Little T&A; you'll notice the tape starts before previous releases as it does not only include Take The A Train (played through the P.A.) but also the final part of previous song: Peter Gunn Theme. We have eliminated the Right Channel (Audience) and left the Left Channel (Soundboard), except around two spots (half a second each spot) in the second and third song that use a second from the audience source to make it all COMPLETE. The sonic volume of this release is HIGH, VERY POWERFUL AND LOUD, even distorted at the beginning; you'll even notice that the sound engineer at the concert did adjust the soundboard mix during When The Whip Comes Down so that the sound stops "cracking". That's the way the transfer was made and we have left it as it is so you can really feel this concert: be sure we have NOT increased or EQd this MONO SOUNDBOARD MASTER. As always there was a tape flip around the forty minutes mark, that's why we have spliced the 15 seconds missing of crowd noise and chat between the songs Let Me Go and Time Is On My Side. The speed of the recording is correct (VGP did run a little slow, EVSD did run a little bit fast) and this complete source is used in CD one (around 80 minutes long), we decided to remaster the rest of the show (around 45 minutes long) from the best VHS source available -the initial seconds of Jumpin' Jack Flash are missing on all VHS tapes and so are not available anywhere-. As a bonustrack we also include the Soundboard portion from following's night concert at the same venue, complete except for the final (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction encore. Houston Can Sing is dedicated to Charlie Rockin' Rott and Mario Dog & Cats, without whom this release would not have been possible.

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